For years, people have asked David Wise how long he thinks he can make a career out of halfpipe skiing.
“I’ve always said, I don’t know how long I can do this for,” Wise said. “I’ll let you know when I get there.”
He’s almost there. Wise, an Olympic gold medalist in 2014 and 2018 and silver medalist in 2022, is in his last Olympic cycle.
He plans to retire after either the 2026 Milan Cortina Games (he must still qualify for the deep U.S. team) or, should he tack it on, a less-intense farewell 2026-27 season.
“Part of me was wondering going into Beijing (in 2022) if it was going to be my last Olympics,” said Wise, a 34-year-old from Reno, Nevada, who has a 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son. “Everything comes at a cost. While I think I have the best job in the world, my kids and wife pay the price because I’m gone a lot. So we definitely did some soul-searching and dug deep. I was honest, and I said I don’t feel like my fuel tank is empty. I still love this job. I have to do something to keep the lights on in the house. I want to try to do this one more time.”
On Dec. 7, Wise made his first ski halfpipe podium in nearly two years.
This weekend, he competes at the Toyota U.S. Grand Prix at Copper Mountain. An NBC Sports and Peacock broadcast schedule is here.
Wise is one of, if not the last active freeskier who knows what it’s like to compete on the sport’s highest level before that level was the Olympics.
He made his Winter X Games debut in 2011, six months before the IOC announced that ski halfpipe and ski slopestyle were added to the Olympic program for the 2014 Sochi Games.
Wise is the only freeskier to win gold at two Olympics and the only American man to win two golds and a silver across all skiing events.
At the 2022 Beijing Games, he was edged out for gold by Nico Porteous of New Zealand.
In January 2023, he won the X Games for his first major title in five years. Two months later, he tore his right ACL in what was already planned to be the last run of his 2022-23 season at the World Championships.
“I kind of was staring the sunset of my career in the face anyway, and then I had sustained another super long-term recovery injury,” said Wise, who broke the femur in the same leg in 2019. “I was kind of asking myself and asking God and asking my family, is this the indication? I’ve never wanted to be in denial when it came time to retire. I didn’t ever want to be in denial about it. So some of that was just me being honest with myself. Do I want to fight? Do I want to work my ass off and come back from this injury and try to stay relevant and try to make another Olympic team? Or do I want to take this as an excuse to retire and still heal my knee and be a functioning athletic human, but not a high-level athlete ever again? And I just don’t. I wasn’t born with quit in me.”
Wise returned for the 2023-24 season, which he called the least successful of his career results-wise. He was 100% physically recovered but never felt confident. He didn’t finish on the podium across six events.
This fall, Wise was joined by daughter Nayeli for his preseason training in Europe for the first time. When she had pigtails, she used to think every skier on TV was her dad.
“She’s almost more of a travel buddy,” he said. “She’s not as dependent on me for her everyday, momentary needs. So I just feel really fortunate to still be able to do what I do for a living and kind of include the family as much as I can.”
Then on Dec. 7, Wise placed third in his season debut in China as part of a historic podium.
Not only was it a U.S. sweep, but it was also made up of three men in their 30s for the first time in World Cup ski halfpipe history. Wise broke his own record as the oldest man to make a podium in the discipline.
“China, for me, was the first time I really felt like myself on skis again,” since the March 2023 ACL tear, he said.
He plans to compete at every World Cup the rest of this season, plus January’s X Games (which he has won a record five times) and March’s World Championships. His goals aren’t results-based, but a broad aim to keep the momentum going from the China podium.
Then next winter, he will bid for a fourth Olympic team. It is expected that the U.S. will have four men in his event at Milan Cortina.
The deep field of American halfpipe skiers includes two-time Olympic medalist Alex Ferreira, three-time slopestyle medalist Nick Goepper (who switched to pipe last year), two-time world champion Aaron Blunck and X Games medalists Hunter Hess and Birk Irving.
Wise can become the oldest male halfpipe skier in his sport’s short Olympic history. He can break Shaun White’s record as the oldest American Olympian in any of the newest gravity-defying ski and snowboard events (halfpipe, slopestyle, big air).
“There’s not that many guys that are doing it into their 30s, and it’s for a reason,” said Canadian Mike Riddle, who took silver behind Wise in 2014 and has been his coach since 2018. “It is hard to keep pushing yourself. The risk versus reward starts to change a little bit as you get older. The risk gets a little higher with all the repetitive injuries and things like that. So for him to be going for it at 35 hasn’t been done. Our sport’s new, but it’s still a feat of athletic achievement, for sure.”
